Page 18 of A Dirty Business
“Do not call me that!” I pointed at him as I kept going.
Churning. More churning.
My stomach was twisting.
The guard moved aside, but I only looked. I didn’t go in the room.
A girl was laid out on the bed, her arms spread out, one of them falling off the bed. Her legs were sprawled out too. She was in a bra and a skirt. The skirt was pushed up around her waist. Her eyes were closed. I tracked her chest, seeing if she was breathing. I couldn’t see any needles, and there was no white around her nostrils.
Fucking hell.
“Is she alive?”
The guard looked at me, no expression. “Yes. Checked her pulse fifteen minutes ago. It’s there.”
I went back to watching her chest, counting her breaths. They were slow, and I was having a hard time seeing much movement.
“You guys have been waiting for me to come before handling this?” My tone picked up. My shit was easing out. My control was breaking.
I went to the other bedroom.
Marco was the one who answered. “We made the call to Stephano. This won’t be happening hereeveragain.” His voice changed, growing the tiniest bit distant, and if I were to guess, he was looking at my father as he said that.
And my father, fuck my father. He was quietnow.
Waiting. Biding his time.
I really loathed Dominic West.
He hadn’t been a father to me. It’d been Uncle Stephano at my ball games. Uncle Stephano who helped me learn how to drive, who took me to the batting cages, who was there when I graduated high school, Columbia, Yale. My dad? Not fucking there. He’d been getting high. Cheating on his wife. A liar. An abus—I had to stop thinking about him, letting all the past rise up. I went to the second room.
It wasn’t much better, except the girl there was fully awake and barely clothed. She was huddling in the corner, her arms wrapped around her knees, and she looked at me, makeup streaming down her face. She was in a bra and this time only underwear. The bed had been stripped. I was guessing they’d pulled everything to keep any more evidence from being left behind. Helped with the cleanup, and because we were Mafia, that’d been their fucking first thought.
Ashton hadn’t moved from just beyond the elevator. His gaze was solely focused on me.
I was aware of how muchhewas aware that I was fast losing any and all restraint I had in me.
I turned, facing Marco and my father in the same direction. “Who are these girls?”
Please be working girls.Not that their fate was any less tragic—it might’ve been more, but because they’d been caught up in this life before now, before my father. He hadn’t been the first to victimize them, just the latest in a long line of others. That, by itself, eased a little bit of the tension in me. Just a tiny bit, but not enough.
And seriously, how sad and pathetic of a thought was that?
“Your father brought them with him. He’s been gambling all week at the casino, getting high and loud in the hotel the rest of the time. We’ve had too many complaints. The last few were calls straight to the police. We cannot give them any more reason than what’s already necessary to come here—”
He would’ve kept going, but I held up a hand. I got the picture.
Ashton’s family bribed a lot of the police, here and in the city, but they didn’t like using favors if they didn’t need to. Especially favors for a jackass like Dominic West.
I locked on my father. “Who are these girls?”
He was big like Stephano, but while Steph kept himself in shape and any excess weight was turned into muscle, I doubted my father could remember the last time he saw the inside of a weight room. He had a paunch on him, and his hair was graying. Right now, it was greasy and messy. He hadn’t shaved in a few days. The bags under his eyes had bags, andtheyhad bags.
I could see the white under his nostrils. He’d recently done a drag.
He also hadn’t answered my question.
“Who are they?” I barked.
